Opened Ground (5 page)

A stagger in air

as if a language

failed, a sleight

of wing.

A snipe’s bleat is fleeing

its nesting-ground

into dialect,

into variants,

transliterations whirr

on the nature reserves –

little
goat
of
the
air,

of
the
evening,

little
goat
of
the
frost.

It is his tail-feathers

drumming elegies

in the slipstream

of wild goose

and yellow bittern

as he corkscrews away

into the vaults

that we live off, his flight

through the sniper’s eyrie,

over twilit earthworks

and wallsteads,

disappearing among

gleanings and leavings

in the combs

of a fieldworker’s archive.

I met a girl from Derrygarve

And the name, a lost potent musk,

Recalled the river’s long swerve,

A kingfisher’s blue bolt at dusk

And stepping stones like black molars

Sunk in the ford, the shifty glaze

Of the whirlpool, the Moyola

Pleasuring beneath alder trees.

And Derrygarve, I thought, was just:

Vanished music, twilit water –

A smooth libation of the past

Poured by this chance vestal daughter.

But now our river tongues must rise

From licking deep in native haunts

To flood, with vowelling embrace,

Demesnes staked out in consonants.

And Castledawson we’ll enlist

And Upperlands, each planted bawn –

Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass –

A vocable, as rath and bullaun.

Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds,

a neighbour laid his shadow

on the stream, vouching

‘It’s as poor as Lazarus, that ground,’

and brushed away

among the shaken leafage.

I lay where his lea sloped

to meet our fallow,

nested on moss and rushes,

my ear swallowing

his fabulous, biblical dismissal,

that tongue of chosen people.

When he would stand like that

on the other side, white-haired,

swinging his blackthorn

at the marsh weeds,

he prophesied above our scraggy acres,

then turned away

towards his promised furrows

on the hill, a wake of pollen

drifting to our bank, next season’s tares.

       For days we would rehearse

       each patriarchal dictum:

       Lazarus, the Pharaoh, Solomon

       and David and Goliath rolled

       magnificently, like loads of hay

       too big for our small lanes,

       or faltered on a rut –

       ‘Your side of the house, I believe,

       hardly rule by the Book at all.’

       His brain was a whitewashed kitchen

       hung with texts, swept tidy

       as the body o’ the kirk. 

Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging

mournfully on in the kitchen

we would hear his step round the gable

though not until after the litany

would the knock come to the door

and the casual whistle strike up

on the doorstep. ‘A right-looking night,’

he might say, ‘I was dandering by

and says I, I might as well call.’

But now I stand behind him

in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.

He puts a hand in a pocket

or taps a little tune with the blackthorn

shyly, as if he were party to

lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping.

Should I slip away, I wonder,

or go up and touch his shoulder

and talk about the weather

or the price of grass-seed?

We picked flints,

Pale and dirt-veined,

So small finger and thumb

Ached around them;

Cold beads of history and home

We fingered, a cave-mouth flame

Of leaf and stick

Trembling at the mind’s wick.

We clicked stone on stone

That sparked a weak flame-pollen

And failed, our knuckle joints

Striking as often as the flints.

What did we know then

Of tinder, charred linen and iron,

Huddled at dusk in a ring,

Our fists shut, our hope shrunken?

What could strike a blaze

From our dead igneous days?

Now we squat on cold cinder,

Red-eyed, after the flames’ soft thunder

And our thoughts settle like ash.

We face the tundra’s whistling brush

With new history, flint and iron,

Cast-offs, scraps, nail, canine.

Some day I will go to Aarhus

To see his peat-brown head,

The mild pods of his eyelids,

His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country nearby

Where they dug him out,

His last gruel of winter seeds

Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for

The cap, noose and girdle,

I will stand a long time.

Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him

And opened her fen,

Those dark juices working

Him to a saint’s kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters’

Honeycombed workings.

Now his stained face

Reposes at Aarhus.

I could risk blasphemy,

Consecrate the cauldron bog

Our holy ground and pray

Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed

Flesh of labourers,

Stockinged corpses

Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth

Flecking the sleepers

Of four young brothers, trailed

For miles along the lines. 

Something of his sad freedom

As he rode the tumbril

Should come to me, driving,

Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands

Of country people,

Not knowing their tongue.

Out there in Jutland

In the old man-killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home.

For beauty, say an ash-fork staked in peat,

Its long grains gathering to the gouged split;

A seasoned, unsleeved taker of the weather

Where kesh and loaning finger out to heather.

I am afraid.

Sound has stopped in the day

And the images reel over

And over. Why all those tears,

The wild grief on his face

Outside the taxi? The sap

Of mourning rises

In our waving guests.

You sing behind the tall cake

Like a deserted bride

Who persists, demented,

And goes through the ritual.

When I went to the Gents

There was a skewered heart

And a legend of love. Let me

Sleep on your breast to the airport.

What she remembers

Is his glistening back

In the bath, his small boots

In the ring of boots at her feet.

Hands in her voided lap,

She hears a daughter welcomed.

It’s as if he kicked when lifted

And slipped her soapy hold.

Once soap would ease off

The wedding ring

That’s bedded forever now

In her clapping hand.

Was it wind off the dumps

or something in heat

dogging us, the summer gone sour,

a fouled nest incubating somewhere?

Whose fault, I wondered, inquisitor

of the possessed air.

To realize suddenly,

whip off the mat

that was larval, moving –

and scald, scald, scald. 

Bushing the door, my arms full

of wild cherry and rhododendron,

I hear her small lost weeping

through the hall, that bells and hoarsens

on my name, my name.

O love, here is the blame.

The loosened flowers between us

gather in, compose

for a May altar of sorts.

          These frank and falling blooms

          soon taint to a sweet chrism.

          Attend. Anoint the wound. 

Oh we tented our wound all right

under the homely sheet

and lay as if the cold flat of a blade

had winded us.

More and more I postulate

thick healings, like now

as you bend in the shower

water lives down the tilting stoups of your breasts. 

                    With a final

                    unmusical drive

                    long grains begin

                    to open and split

                    ahead and once more

                    we sap

                    the white, trodden

                    path to the heart.

My children weep out the hot foreign night.

We walk the floor, my foul mouth takes it out

On you and we lie stiff till dawn

Attends the pillow, and the maize, and vine

That holds its filling burden to the light.

Yesterday rocks sang when we tapped

Stalactites in the cave’s old, dripping dark –

Our love calls tiny as a tuning fork.

The Irish nightingale

Is a sedge-warbler,

A little bird with a big voice

Kicking up a racket all night.

Not what you’d expect

From the musical nation.

I haven’t even heard one –

Nor an owl, for that matter.

My serenades have been

The broken voice of a crow

In a draught or a dream,

The wheeze of bats

Or the ack-ack

Of the tramp corncrake

Lost in a no-man’s-land

Between combines and chemicals.

So fill the bottles, love,

Leave them inside their cots,

And if they do wake us, well,

So would the sedge-warbler.

I have crossed the dunes with their whistling bent

Where dry loose sand was riddling round the air

And I’m walking the firm margin. White pocks

Of cockle, blanched roofs of clam and oyster

Hoard the moonlight, woven and unwoven

Off the bay. At the far rocks

A pale sud comes and goes.

Under boards the mackerel slapped to death

Yet still we took them in at every cast,

Stiff flails of cold convulsed with their first breath.

My line plumbed certainly the undertow,

Loaded against me once I went to draw

And flashed and fattened up towards the light.

He was all business in the stern. I called

‘This is so easy that it’s hardly right,’

But he unhooked and coped with frantic fish

Without speaking. Then suddenly it lulled,

We’d crossed where they were running, the line rose

Like a let-down and I was conscious

How far we’d drifted out beyond the head.

‘Count them up at your end,’ was all he said

Before I saw the porpoises’ thick backs

Cartwheeling like the flywheels of the tide,

Soapy and shining. To have seen a hill

Splitting the water could not have numbed me more

Than the close irruption of that school,

Tight viscous muscle, hooped from tail to snout,

Each one revealed complete as it bowled out

And under.

                    They will attack a boat.

I knew it and I asked him to put in

But he would not, declared it was a yarn

My people had been fooled by far too long

And he would prove it now and settle it.

Maybe he shrank when those sloped oily backs

Propelled towards us: I lay and screamed

Under splashed brine in an open rocking boat,

Feeling each dunt and slither through the timber,

Sick at their huge pleasures in the water.

I sometimes walk this strand for thanksgiving

Or maybe it’s to get away from him

Skittering his spit across the stove. Here

Is the taste of safety, the shelving sand

Harbours no worse than razor-shell or crab –

Though my father recalls carcasses of whales

Collapsed and gasping, right up to the dunes.

But tonight such moving sinewed dreams lie out

In darker fathoms, far beyond the head.

Astray upon a debris of scrubbed shells

Between parched dunes and salivating wave,

I have rights on this fallow avenue,

A membrane between moonlight and my shadow.